3.2 Polish Items

Last update: March 15, 2006 (Changes since March 13, 2006 in green. New entries in Team and JDT UI)

New additions in green.

Entries in RED have been fixed.

Entries in BLUE are not in the plan for 3.2

So far, I have received input from the Search, Platform/JDT Text, JDT
Core, JDT UI, and Debug teams. This document contains a summary of that feedback.
The items are listed by component, but are otherwise in no particular order.

General / All

Bugzilla

Description

Do we need a new splash screen? MVM asked designers to investigate in light of new welcome as well. No significant changes planned here

Update keywords for searching preference pages. I.e. verify that all the new preferences are covered.

There's also the "festival of carets" bug. This is immediately noticeable to anyone using a recent GTK+, and it makes us look bad. Unfortunately, it appears to be a bug somewhere in the Cairo/Pango/glib/GTK+ stack specific to the FPU mode (which the Java VM modifies on start-up). This bug is bad and will be hard to track down. We need to do work if we want to see this fixed; we can't just say "It's their problem".

Platform Team

Bugzilla

Description

Need a general polish pass on new History view filtering and user interactions. The bugs below are examples...

There are sometimes <a name="too_may_password">]too many password dialogs:

If I'm trying to work off-line but have CVS projects in workspace, it can happen that you get lots of dialogs to ask for the password as the CVS decorators each need that password. Clicking cancel once should be enough to let them know that I'm not interested in entering the password now.

It would be nice to have a less intrusive way of asking for passwords. Idea is e.g. a status line icon similar to the progress view that blinks when a passwords are pending. Clicking on this icon brings a 'authentication view' that shows that status of all passwords: passed, failed, canceled, and lets me trying to connect again.

Platform Text

In order to resolve this we first need to put the grounds for drag and drop contributions
to editors, otherwise clients contributing some sort of DnD will get broken.
This is covered in bug 125957 and won't make it into 3.2.

Platform UI team is investigating what can/can not be done about this without Doug around

</td>

</tr>

</td>

Finish the preferences clean up effort from 3.0:

decorator preference pages should offer a link to decorators</li>

font / color preferences should use shared settings so it is also possible to configure the color and font decoration for CVS on the CVS page

UI - please provide a bug for this so we can track polish

</td>

</tr>

</td>

Improve the look of the filter control (preferences, other dialogs):

the text field seems unaligned as long as there is no 'clear' button

either dump the 'clear' button, or add it as a lay-over over the text field:

For example, in Thunderbird (mozilla mail client), they added a magnifying glass inside the text field (Good visual indication what this field is about) and the clear button ('x', is IMO a better icon than what we have) is inside the text field when applicable. Even better is the help text in light gray.

UI - please provide a bug for this so we
can track polish

</td>

</tr>

</td>

The fast view icon looks like a bug, as the lower right corner is missing. For all the icons on the fast view bar, it isn't obvious what they do. They should be more "inviting" to click on. Maybe some extra adornment in the icon like an arrow that points in the direction they will open. The tooltip should also show the keyboard shortcut.